One of the classic pieces of software engineering literature that has had a profound influence on me since first reading it at Penn Engineering is The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Books. Fred initially authored the book in 1975 based on his experiences at IBM managing the development of OS/360. His central thesis is that leveraging man-months, a hypothetical unit of work representing the work done by one person in a month, as an effective way to estimate software projects is a myth. Put more simply, adding manpower to a late software project in fact makes it even later. This is because adding additional people to a software project significantly increasing the communication overhead and more people need to communicate in order to ensure they are aligned and aware of what everyone else is doing on the project. This significantly reduces the incremental output from each added resource.
Solving for the Mythical Man-Month
One of the classic pieces of software engineering literature that has had a profound influence on me since first reading it at Penn Engineering is The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Books. Fred initially authored the book in 1975 based on his experiences at IBM managing the development of OS/360. His central thesis is that leveraging man-months, a hypothetical unit of work representing the work done by one person in a month, as an effective way to estimate software projects is a myth. Put more simply, adding manpower to a late software project in fact makes it even later. This is because adding additional people to a software project significantly increasing the communication overhead and more people need to communicate in order to ensure they are aligned and aware of what everyone else is doing on the project. This significantly reduces the incremental output from each added resource.